Readers Guide: Caleb Carr’s ‘The Legend of Broken’ at Library

Western enthusiast and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry has put together a new biography of George Armstrong Custer.

by Susie Stooksbury/Special to The Oak Ridger

Western enthusiast and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry has put together a new biography of George Armstrong Custer. Filled with paintings by noted Western artists such as Frederic Remington and photographs by Matthew Brady, “Custer” (921.000) offers an engaging look at the flamboyant general, his fatal performance at the Little Big Horn, and the legends surrounding him which were fostered by his wife, Libbie, and Buffalo Bill Cody.

The always surprising Caleb Carr returns with an incredibly imaginative work set in Germany during the Dark Ages. “The Legend of Broken,” Carr explains in his prologue, is an ancient document he discovered while going through the papers of the late historian Edward Gibbon. It tells of Broken, a city carved out of granite and surrounded by the Davon Wood, where a race of diminutive beings called the Bane live. Sorcery and science begin to mesh as the people of Broken and the Bane must put aside their age old hatred to find the source of the pestilence that is slowly killing them all.

Siblings Grace and Andrew Easton inherit their grandmother's house in London and decide it is large enough for them to live in comfortably and separately. That works well until Andrew's boyfriend, James Derain, moves in. When Andrew and James witness a friend's murder, the trauma they each suffer shakes up the household. Somewhat unsympathetic, Grace decides to lose herself in a good book. She chooses an unpublished work by a once popular novelist that strangely echoes her own situation. Things always get a little edgier when Ruth Rendell writes as Barbara Vine. “The Child’s Child” is Vine’s latest.

Parenting today is challenging and often difficult even under the best of circumstances, but what of parents who have children that fall outside the mainstream? How do you deal with a child who is autistic or born with Dwarfism or is gay or goes on a shooting rampage? National Book Award winner Andrew Solomon spent 10 years researching these questions, interviewing thousands of people along the way, to present “Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity” (362.400).

Donald Bain, who took on the guise of Jessica Fletcher to produce a ton of “Murder She Wrote” mysteries, now takes over the “Capital Crimes” series begun by the late Margaret Truman. When Sheila Klauss is arrested for running down her psychiatrist Mark Sedgwick, Dr. Nicholas Tatum, who works with the Criminal Behavior Unit, asks Mackensie Smith to represent her. Tatum believes Klauss was under hypnosis when she killed Sedgwick — a theory that leads them to an elaborate scheme to assassinate presidential candidate George Martinson. “Margaret Truman’s Experiment in Murder” (M) is the title.

With Peter Jackson's rendition of J.R.R. Tolkien's “The Hobbit” filling movie theaters this season, playwright Noble Smith explores the lessons we can all learn from Bilbo Baggins and his people. “The Wisdom of the Shire: a Short Guide to a Long and Happy Life” (823.000) highlights the way of life of the brave, unassuming Hobbits who seem to find happiness in the simplest of things.

Other new titles:

Fiction — “Two Graves,” by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child;

“Agenda 21,” by Glenn Beck;

“A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership” (SS), by Wendell Berry;